Have something to say?

Ready to be published? LXer is read by around 350,000 individuals each month, and is an excellent place for you to publish your ideas, thoughts, reviews, complaints, etc. Do you have something to say to the Linux community?

Tor and the BEAST SSL attack

Today, Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong presented a new attack on TLS <= 1.0 at the Ekoparty security conference in Buenos Aires. Let's talk about how it works, and how it relates to the Tor protocol.

Short version: Don't panic. The Tor software itself is just fine, and the free-software browser vendors look like they're responding well and quickly. I'll be talking about why Tor is fine; I'll bet that the TBB folks will have more to say about browsers sometime soon.

There is some discussion of the attack and responses to it out there already, written by seriously smart cryptographers and high-test browser security people. But I haven't seen anything out there yet that tries to explain what's going on for people who don't know TLS internals and CBC basics.